Blog

2017:

{ 27 Sep 2017 }

Recently I had the pleasure of attending RubyKaigi 2017 in Hiroshima Japan. It was really great experience to travel to Japan again in order to attend a technology conference on the programming language that everyone seems to love, Ruby. Ruby was created by Matz to be easy for developers. This means that there are often multiple ways of doing things, user generous syntax to make life a little better for coders, and other nice features that make it a great way to write code. Some very serious webpages run on Ruby including Air-BnB, Bloomberg and image service 500px.

More impressive than performance however, is Ruby’s community. Over the week of the conference I got to know some amazing core committers who showed me a really great time. I would encourage developers everywhere to consider attending RubyKaigi2018, which will be held in Sendai.

Getting close to finishing my Masters Degree, and will have some new images and media from my thesis year to share once it is all complete. Some major highlights for me have been collaborating on a video installation by artist Chris Ulutupu to be shown at the Hobart Tasmania Biennale (also called the Hobiennale.) I am really happy with how this work turned out, and I was very fortunate to provide Director of Photography services for this very talented artist. Check out his work on Circuit: http://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/christopher-ulutupu

{ 15 Mar 2017 }

I’ve had a big few weeks in tech and art alike, and I think I should briefly set out some the things that have been occupying me these last few weeks. I had a blast attending the first NZ.JS(CON), which is the New Zealand Javascript Convention run by the NZ Javascript Society. This was my first tech conference, yet I didn’t feel overwhelmed or confused by very much of the content. Whether this was down to a well-balanced set of talks, or a reflection of my growing understanding of the language and environment of Javascript, I’m not sure. Either way I had a great time and absorbed a lot of useful and interesting ideas. One of my favourite presentations was from Nat Dudley (@natdudley), who gave a talk on web design and accessibility. From her talk I learned about Chroma.js, a small library for working with colour in Javascript. Due to my interest in art and programming, this talk about colour space, colour blindness and data visualization was fascinating to me.

In other news, I’ve received my first art commission as a result of showing work at an art show in the Horowhenua over the weekend. I’ve been asked to create a massive 2.5 meter print of one of my photographs, and have been busy preparing a quote for this project. More to come on this!

{ 24 Feb 2017 }

I have finished Beginning Javascript, (5th Ed.) by Jeremy McPeak and Paul Wilton.

Learning Javascript has been incredibly rewarding, and I feel quite happy with spending my summer learning this exciting language. I find it intriguing that although this language has become ubiquitous on the web, it is still rapidly evolving with new frameworks and features all the time. My next goal is to learn basic Node.js to start hosting apps on my own server.

This is a mini app, using Javascript with jQuery to pull a short list of nearby restaurants from the Google Places API, using your browser’s geolocation feature.

{ 03 Feb 2017 }

I have decided to try keeping an up-to-date record of my progress learning coding with Javascript. I’ve been working through Beginning Javascript, (5th Ed.) by Jeremy McPeak and Paul Wilton. I have found the text extremely engaging and clear, it has been a real pleasure for me to work through. I have taken to Javascript quite well, and so far have had a great time learning how to code in this simple intuitive language.

Thanks for taking a look. Please let me know if there are any issues with your browser!

For those interested in the code, I am moving an HTML element around the screen using Javascript, and loading the correct frame of animation from a set of JPGs taken from a sprite sheet of the Link character from the NES game Legend of Zelda.